General

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 21, 2012 — What’s a poor reader to do? Industrial giant General Electric, a crucially important company for many in the energy biz and long a stalwart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, announced its fourth quarter economic performance this week. The New York Times, which always follows GE […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., January 18, 2012 – In denying TransCanada’s permit for the Keystone XL pipeline to move oil from Alberta’s tar sands projects to U.S. refineries, the Obama administration has stepped directly into a Republican political trap. Given how savvy the Obama folks are about these sorts of events, I confess I’m […]

By Kennedy Maize   Washington, D.C., January 12, 2012 — The ancient English idiom “It’s an ill wind that blows no good” takes on specificity following an article in tomorrow’s Science magazine. The article argues that increased winds in the Southern Ocean, likely caused by a changing global climate, are a boon to the wandering […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 21, 2011 – Call it “The Little Breeder that Could.” Sixty years ago – December 21, 1951 – on the remote, high Idaho desert near Arco, legendary atomic scientist Walter Zinn from the Atomic Energy Commission’s Argonne lab outside Chicago, overseeing the Idaho project, wrote in his log book, […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 15, 2011 – The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission yesterday gave a big lump of holiday coal to Duke Energy and Progress Energy, putting the colossal Carolina utility merger on hold pending an improved plan to mitigate market power. It isn’t clear whether FERC’s latest skepticism about the merger will […]

By Dan Auld San Diego, December 4, 2011 — Will Rush Limbaugh save the solar industry? It looks that way for Toni Lynch in Allentown, Pennsylvania and Spiro Basho in Hicksville, New York. That’s a hoot, given Limbaugh’s well-known antipathy toward anything remotely resembling renewable energy. Limbaugh has repeatedly taken to the airwaves to slam […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington DC, December 6, 2011—The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rolled out the latest, and fifth, of its Future Of series of studies of U.S. energy policy, this one focused on the interstate electric transmission grid. The massive transmission tome contains little that’s new to anyone who has followed this subject. Included […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., December 2, 2011 — Think the tension between electric reliability and environmental protection is just theoretical hand-waving? Debra Raggio, assistant general counsel at GenOn Energy, the non-utility generator formerly known as Mirant, will tell you you’re wrong, and she can back it up. Raggio told her tale of regulatory Catch-22 […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., November 17, 2011 — Let’s stipulate: Texas Gov. Rick Perry is a doofus. I’ve elsewhere characterized him as “a stuffed shirt, in an empty suit, talkin’ through his hat.” I was being kind. In his recent debate “Oops!” moment, Perry was able to name only two of the three federal […]

By Kennedy Maize Washington, D.C., October 18, 2011 — Remember the flap about inconsistencies between the Energy Information Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey over shale gas estimates for the Marcellus formation? Forget about it. According to a new paper from the Washington think tank Resources for the Future, there’s no discrepancy at all: the […]